Bill Varoula: Not all have the same right to run away from the police

Usually I think about these little irritants for about 10 days before I start to write them. Then it's one, panic-driven day of writing, another of rewriting and half a day of revising on deadline day. (I email them to the paper at about 11:35 a.m. for sentimental reasons.)

But this time I had actually completed the process (sans email) within five days of the last column's appearing in the paper. I was very proud of myself and wallowing in the feeling. Then came the April 30th Sun-News and what it revealed. I abandoned my plans.

It wasn't the story about the city terminating the lease of the Mesquite Neighborhood Learning Center, a dastardly act. It wasn't the column whining about the existence of progressives again. It was the story about the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and your constitutionally protected right to run away, unencumbered, from the police, unless you're in the wrong part of town. The story, and the idea, struck home, hard. We've been here before.

One of my children has severe learning disabilities and, as a result, behavioral problems. Shortly after my wife died, I was encouraged to cede guardianship over my son to a professional organization that is better able to deal with his long-term medical, governmental and educational problems than I am, especially at my age. They can also be with him 24 hours a day, every day while I am afflicted with acute disorder compulsive disorder and am not always useful.

The arrangement has worked out reasonably well, but not always. He is happy with his current group home and guardian, but a few group homes ago things did not go very well at all. Note that my wife and I taught him that when he was feeling especially anxious or angry, he should walk off by himself and think things through. It always worked. He would return a calmer, happier man.

One day the staff members assigned to him were doing little more than exercising their authority in trying to solve a dispute. My son walked away, into the desert. The staff followed, being obliged to, but quickly ran out of useful jurisdiction. My son ran out of sight.

Since the staff couldn't cajole him back, they turned his reverie into a criminal offense. They called the police, who were told little more than that he wouldn't do what staff said. When the police got to him, they poured out of their little van, lined up, and aimed their terrifying police rifles at a kid armed with one-half a soda can lid hidden in his waistband. Since my son was out in the desert, the least threatening of all local environments, and he was cognizant of how a flurry of police bullets can completely disrupt your thought processes, he ran.

Instead of chasing him and this not being an episode of "Cops", LCPD saved itself the misery of running out of breath by sending a dog after my son. He immediately lay on the ground, face first, arms stretched out over his head just as he thought he should. The dog got him, making quick work of one of his brachial arteries, which called for emergency surgery.

So combining last Thursday's page-two article and my son's experience, we now know that the same behavior in different neighborhoods elicits a different response from the police; that you can walk, even run away from the police and do so with impunity, but also be arrested for loitering. There must be some other factors involved. Did I mention that my son is black?

Bill Varuola is longtime resident of Las Cruces who recently retired as a teacher at the Doña Ana County Juvenile Detention Center.